I am usually the first person to text after a first date. I’ve always applied to jobs I am underqualified for. I raise my hand for opportunities at work that I will probably fail at. When I was 15, I called my crush and asked him out via VOICEMAIL. This is all to say, I…

It’s raining and I’m longing for someone who hasn’t thought about me in weeks. This is where I’m comfortable. In the tolerable melancholy, that sweet familiar ache. I don’t want everything because half the fun is in that wanting. Yearning is a fading art. Why flesh our dramatic scenes with them in your mind, first…

I. I was Bambi for Halloween freshman year. Simple costume, elaborate face makeup gleaned from Halloween makeup tutorials that 18 year old boys still somehow found a way to sexualize. Sexy cartoon characters exist (hello Danny Phantom) but Bambi is not one of them. There’s a feminist analysis here about the infantilization of women but…

Despite the fact that there’s a high of 92 today in DC, it is the first day of fall. And with the crunchy leaves and pumpkin spice lattes comes another important marker of the changing weather: cuffing season. For those of you who aren’t familiar with cuffing season (aka the above 30s and the happily…

I don’t know if you’ll read this, and I hope you don’t. Just know that this isn’t for you, none of these words ever are. It’s not about the last pair of hands that spelled safety. Or how grateful I was for the dark, even the moon dimmed, when the truth came. Maybe this will…

There is the bittersweet milky blue skin of your neck,  Flesh and stone at the same time.  The dark hair curling its fingers down the nape of your neck, the corners of your body.    I always thought of you as more beautiful than I.  My graceless form, a resting place, a stopover,  A tangent…

Need becomes a dirty word when you grow up.  Edged in knives and desperation, it tastes of everything “woman”.  It is the unsightly mess you should have shoved underneath your bed.    Were you born like this or were you taught to be incomplete,  Apologizing for a phantom absence, a make-believe missing.  But now here…

*based off of/inspired by Olivia Gatwood’s “An Alternate Universe in Which I am Unfazed by the Men Who Do Not Love Me”   I ask him if we are friends, sober, in the morning, and I keep asking questions until I am sure of the way he sees me in his head. I never romance…

In your 20s, the drive to improve yourself seems to reach a fever pitch. You’re young, you’re hungry, you’ve been taught that this decade is the *most* important one. And in the age of instagrammable wellness, lifestyle virtue signalling, the classism and consumerism that drives it all, “getting your shit together” has become more of…

How do you want to be touched? Peach palm flat against your breathing back  Tight around the coil of your spine  Rattled, relieved, ravenous Top spun dizzy, fingers recording topography  Or maybe  Sweet tooth bite and a salty lick  To the root of things  Unraveled core and half moon nail hollows Pain is all about…